The dream was always the same. Always the same shocking two-dimensional waves of color, bereft of depth though gradually separating into fields of blues diverging into discernable horizons. These horizons stretch and grow angularly entering into the third and fourth dimensions as they progress toward some unknowable future when, for the first time in all this ego enters into this situation. I realize I am here, somehow: flying, bodiless, astrally projecting, a part of the luminiferous æther, though I can’t glance down at my arms for example I do know of the concept the arm, skin, blood, bone and muscle, etc., though it is of no concern as I glide through, no, am part of the transition from beinglessness into a gestalt of more than mere humanity.

It is then I begin to sense depth. I can perceive long running lines breaking to and fro the ever-lengthening horizon. These lines connote angles which break into cracks and fissures of a blue purer than what seems to be a vast blue-ice-white ocean forming beneath what would be my feet, if I had them. The angles begin to run as wild winged pegasi against a backdrop of azur, leaping and gamboling frivolously though with an ease and inherent strength rarely experienced in manmade. The angles eventually fall beneath the ever-swelling ocean and delve deeper than what seems to be forming into my human body could ever survive at without pressure-relieving equipment, leaving wide sheets of blue gradient running orthogonally toward the curve of infinite and eventually to black.

Full of body and suddenly tumbling through the sky, up and down meaningless, a blinding sun flipped parallaxically here and there due to gravity’s perverse anal retentiveness. Caught in swaths between white hot light: these same blue lines angling ever closer toward me, yet now and then mixing in with shocks of green and yellow, hues of varied and appealing warmth, spectrums ranging from said warmth to a cool of brazen hussy lips colder than ice. All this in a circus acrobat’s fall from a wire suspended from God only knows where onto the sudden net of a summertime lea between two arched hills not uncharacteristic of a woman’s hips enthralled, plush with breezes.

Once physics has formally set in our Camera-in-the-sky performs a quick panoramic pull-out to view this pastoral scene set vaginally centered in a great mountain of ice, floeing and fjorded, massive as a sperm whale in a delicatessen, yours truly lying naked (probably purring) in this vulvar depression with only a mountain bike and a pair of unbreakable sunglasses surrounding me.

Then quick as all that the I’m back in Brooklyn, cycling the once-mean city streets, through all the dismal gray and glass and metallic heat reflections, pushing ever on through to that bracing blue forever set in my eyes at some distant horizon that I can’t quite convince myself is reachable, and am equally unable to persuade myself to stop trying.

Keep on riding.

The Buddha said that life is about contradictions. Vegetarians wearing leather. Environmental bumper stickers on SUVs. The Fuji Rock Festival being nowhere near Mt. Fuji.

Truth is, Smash (the organizer promoting the 3-day, 130,000 strong festival) did try to hold it at the foot of Mt. Fuji in its inaugural attempt back in 1997, but a typhoon famously, disastrously swooped off the sea and cancelled the show. Hence Mt. Naeba, a ski resort in Yuzawa, Niigata, a large rural prefecture located on the northwest shores of Japan (Yuzawa is the setting for Kawabata Yasunari’s classic Snow Country), has been hosting the country’s largest music festival since Hidaka Masahiro started it in 1999.

Boasting musicians the likes of Lee “Scratch” Perry, Grand Master Flash, Bootsie Collins, Spearhead, Ian Brown and Primal Scream, this year’s lineup is eclectic to say the least. It includes many seemingly peripheral acts, though acts that have been delivering strong, rock-steady performances before some of these young concert-goers were out of diapers. Other plusses are the community spirit and low crime despite the close quarters (camping’s the norm unless you book a hotel a year in advance). Corporate sponsorship remains low, despite the relatively blasé attitude most Japanese have toward ever-advancing consumerism, and the banning of fliers and product campaigns with their annoying bullhorn approach to sales is almost as refreshing an experience as the near constant rainfall which seems to annually bless or plague (depending on your religious affiliation) the festival. Another aesthetic asset is that the festival aims to be “the cleanest festival in the world” and seems to be on the mark. Although garbage and recycling stations are relatively far apart, your young, well-behaved and environmentally conscious attendees are generally diligent about toting their own portable ashtrays and plastic bags (given out by the staff at the entrance) for hours at a time.

Minuses are the rocky pathways, which though peaceful and serenely set in a beautiful wooded area, are generally overcrowded and one-way, making getting to the Green Stage, for example, in time to see My Bloody Valentine headline Friday night from the Special Others (a great Japanese jamband) playing the Field of Heaven stage logistically impossible. Thank Buddha for press passes. But wait, the press doesn’t actually get anything resembling press passes at all, save for a lime green mesh photo jersey in which to sweat profusely. No press tent, no lockers or storage for necessary camera gear, no wi-fi. It’s truly roughing it.

The biggest, most internationally friendly event in Japan has come a long way since ’97 and still has a long way to go. I for one would like to see a more concerted effort to introduce a bit of anarchy into the three-day carnival atmosphere, but unless it occurs organically of its own volition, well, that would be a contradiction now wouldn’t it.

Here are the photos

Technorati Tags: Alternative music, Concert Photography, HESO Magazine, Japanese Music Scene, Japanese Rock, Live Music, Manny Santiago

Recently via the ever-cicuitous paths of death and marriage and photography I’ve managed to get in a bit of cross-continental trekking recently: Long Beach, L.A., Sacramento, Portland, Manhattan, Brooklyn and finally Emigrant Gap near Lake Tahoe. Up in the trees and mountains, amidst the swirling smoke and whirling flames of countless mountain wildfires decimating the region and slowly closing in on the wedding celebration of the McKenzies and the Lunds, threatening to cancel all the fun and beauty, comes the most recent DM Media designed 70 page photobook (available via the blurb link below) On The Granite.

Here are the photos

Technorati Tags: California, Global Warming, Lake Tahoe, On The Granite, Wildfires

“You may think you know what you’re dealing with, but believe me, you don’t.” Noah Cross to J.J. Gittes

Chinatown, where secrets go to live. What ring of hell would Dante have use to described this labyrinthine neighborhood of duplicity? The dark underbelly piled up with pasts too numerous to remember, too horrible to forget. A fact all too familiar for private detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), a one-time Los Angeles cop who has worked the beat in Chinatown before and has come full circle to see firsthand how quickly blood seeps into these infernal streets.

What makes Chinatown, a gritty film noir portrayal of corrupt LA politics in the 30s, Roman Polanski’s (Rosemary’s Baby, The Pianist) masterpiece is not merely Nicholson’s deft acting, nor Robert Towne’s (The Yakuza, Ask The Dust) extensively researched script (based upon the California Water Wars of the 30s), nor even the instantly absorbing mise-en-scene and camerawork by John A. Alonzo. Nothing so tangible can be identified to explain its ability to exceed the clichéd conventions of the detective genre, yet it’s the small attention to details, like Gittes’ off-putting nose bandage, Jerry Goldsmith’s hauntingly sparse score and the haunting phrase which the movie ends on, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” which give the film its transcendent power.

What subtly emerges through the film is not so much the constant deceptions Gittes has to muddle through (Faye Dunaway’s Evelyn Mulwray for one) to find the truth, nor the fact that the majority of the movie has little to do with Chinatown as a physical place as opposed to metaphysical construct, but rather the softly persistent ideas of memory and loss. Gittes’ inability to take his own advice given to a client, “Have you ever heard the expression ‘Let sleeping dogs lie?’ Sometimes you’re better off not knowing…” comes back to haunt him, as it had before and, most likely, as it will again.

Technorati Tags: Chinatown, Film Reviews, HESO Magazine, Manny Santiago, Robert Towne, Roman Polanski

We are a culture of collectively useless maps.

Temporary tracings of lead-lined roads destined for incomplete blurbs in fractured future histories.

The End Is Always Nigh.

A permanent thrust.

An endless surge.

A future replete with the repeated follies of past failures.

A perpetual one-night stand.

Technorati Tags: Flickr, New York, photography

Dreams of strange (but aren’t they all) and safe cannibalistic meanderings in post-apocalyptic consumer society.

- Americans and Japanese in conjunction searching (traveling miles/kilometers) over buildingless landscape of swirling fogs and half-naked stragglers beating retreats from god-knows-what trying in all earnestness for Mexican Food.

- Savage Chesire cat smiles beaming in from out of the fog while half-crazed guides lead you via gibberish maps composed of some kind of organics and entrails over the some nation’s battered arterial highway system mostly populated by the tripedal over-consumer-oriented masses who miss commercialism and thusly act out their atavistic zombie-like dreams in mass-organized public communion. The freeway is the new church.

- Human Lasagna.

- Ghosts and spirits are everywhere, mostly benign. Only moving my ashtray around and giggling.

- There are no leaders. There is no money. Spinal Fluid, Amniotic Fluid, Semen, Blood, Pus, Earwax even, and Saliva (in that order) as the only kind of truly valuable currency left to trade for food. The values vary daily and are decided in the marketplace depending upon what still-lingering free-market mentality of supply and demand exists.

- There’s always someone blocking your path, be it intentional or not. The question is: How do you fight out if it?

I think about making lists, but I do not make them. I have a million of them, ready to pen at a moment’s notice, in sequential order no less, should I find a free leaf of paper and a pen I trust.

I suppose I am intimidated by notebooks, piled and priced so attractively in stores worldwide, so naked and inviting, so full of potential. So much so it mocks my own, I have to avoid he thought of forests themselves. Trees mock me.

So I turn to women. Their skin my scroll, my nails, my eyes, my breath. The ink, my member. The implement of my only truth, scribing toward a sum greater than mere physical bodies tumbling in the halflight of the visible spectrum. Somehow further than the flimsy synapse lapse of post-coital glow. The writing on the wall, or the sheet as it were.

GIA, ETA, IRA, ELN, FARC, Tamil Tigers, Islamic Jihad, Abu Sayaf. What do these names mean? What do they represent? What are their goals? And especially, what makes the men who establish, recruit for and run them tick?

Phil Rees, award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker, asks all these questions and more in his first book, Dining With Terrorists (Macmillan 2005). Traveling around the globe to Algeria, Afghanistan, Israel, Columbia, Sri Lanka, Kosovo and Cambodia to name a few, Rees received access to places and people no western journalist has had before. Promising little, save to objectively report all points of view (as opposed to the popular party doctrine), Rees was able to sit down and, while unabashedly questioning theses organizations’ objectives and tactics, do what most would never dream of with so-called terrorists: break bread.

What Rees is shooting for he sums up well by saying, “I also wished I had met Osama bin Laden. Whether or not bin Laden was evil would not have been my starting point. I wanted to know what made him tick. Why had he become the man he was? Why were young Muslim men willing to join him in battle and die for their faith?”. What makes a terrorist tick indeed.

Even more to the heart of the matter Rees asks, what is the definition of “terrorist”? Remember that once this same word was applied to Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela. Since the popular advent of the word in late 18th century France, no one political body, let alone the United Nations, has agreed on a universal definition. Rees says, “The failure to define ‘terrorist’ means that the ‘war on terror’ can be used as a cloak to legitimize American military power because it portrays the challenge of a loosely defined threat that will never disappear. By being unable to explain exactly who is a terrorist the ‘war on terror’ can mutate into a war against any ideology that challenges America and her allies. Terror can become a code for opponents who question the status quo and a catch-all as diverse as Islamic militancy, emerging nationalism or anti-globalization. The world is in danger of accepting the confused idea of an endless conflict against an undefined enemy.” In the end Rees not only wants to point out clearly and without hesitation who our enemies are, but also figure out how they became our enemies. To do that, he for one, is willing to get his hands dirty, is willing to sit down to dine worlds away with some of the world’s most dangerous in order to get the hard answers we truly need to move toward peace.

Technorati Tags: BBC Documentary, Dining With Terrorists, HESO Magazine, Phil Rees, United Nations

“Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

- Eugene V. Debs, after being arrested under the Espionage Act of 1917 on June 16, 1918 in Canton, Ohio in opposition to World War I. Though convicted and sentenced to serve ten years in prison he still ran for president in the 1920 election while in prison in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He received 913,664 votes (3.4 percent), the highest number of votes for a Socialist Party presidential candidate.

“If there is a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for their prescription drugs, and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandparent. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties.”

- Senator Barack Obama’s 2004 Democratic National Convention Keynote Address “The Audacity of Hope”.

Occasionally history repeating itself is not a bad thing.

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, Eugene V. Debs, Sugardisaster